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Overview

Titled Automated Schedules — “Manage automated tasks for this instance”. Recurring actions against this one machine.
Navigation: Compute → Virtual Machines → click a machine → Schedules.

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What it’s for

The empty state doubles as the explanation, offering three cases:
The first one is where the money is. A development machine left running overnight and at weekends costs roughly three times what it needs to, and a stop schedule removes that without anyone remembering to do it.Note that a stopped machine still consumes storage and network quota — stopping saves compute, not everything. See Quotas and limits.

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What a row shows

Each schedule shows its Timezone and Status, with transient chips Creating... and Deleting... while work is in flight.

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Editing only changes the description

Edit Schedule edits the description and nothing else — “Update the description used to identify this schedule.”The timing cannot be changed. To move a schedule to a different time you delete it and create a new one. Worth knowing before you go looking for a time field that isn’t there.

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Schedules versus backup schedules

Two different things, in two different sections:
The empty state mentions “Automated Backups” as a use case, but backup automation is configured in the Backups section, not here. Don’t create a schedule expecting it to produce backups.

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Common task: stop development machines overnight

1

Confirm the machine is genuinely non-production

A stop schedule on something serving traffic is an outage. Check what depends on it first.
2

Create the stop schedule

Create Schedule, choosing a stop action outside working hours — 19:00 is a reasonable default for most teams.
3

Decide whether you also want a start schedule

Starting at 08:00 means the machine is warm when people arrive. Leaving it stopped means it only runs when someone actually needs it, which is cheaper. Either is defensible; pick deliberately.
4

Use one timezone across the fleet

UTC for everything. Mixed timezones make “did everything stop last night?” much harder to answer, and they shift twice a year.
5

Write the reason in the description

This is the one field you can edit later, and it’s the only place the intent is recorded. “Stop dev overnight — cost saving” beats an unexplained schedule somebody is afraid to delete.
6

Verify it fired

Check Jobs the next morning, widening the time window past the six-hour default. A schedule can exist while every run fails.
Creating a schedule is not evidence that it works. Confirm the first run in Jobs or Events — this section shows that a schedule exists, not whether it is succeeding.

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Empty and error states

Backups tab

Backup automation, which lives there instead.

Jobs

Confirming a scheduled run actually happened.

Quotas and limits

What stopping a machine does and does not free.